SLEEP TIGHT So now it's time to say good night. In French we'd say Bonne Nuit Let Slumber take you to the realms of Oz or Nefertiti Encapsulate your woes and vitalize with what dreams bring Enjoy a foursome Tiger Arnie you and Veejay Singh Perhaps if not for dreams our kind would long since be extinct
Here is my take on an environmental catastrophe…
When I was a young father and my child was a toddler, something often happened after her bath. Her mother would swaddle our child in a towel and call out “Is the Bundle Receiver ready?” and I would answer “READY. Where’s…BUNDLE?”
My child, looking a little like a nomad. would walk into the living room. “HERE’s Bundle!” she would chirp.
“WHAT is your Pleasure, Bundle?”
“TWIRL.”
“Is…Butt…adequately covered?” At this, she would do a quick about-face and reveal that her hindquarters were, indeed, covered.
“Very well. I shall SCOOP you UP.” And I would sweep her off her feet into my arms and, slowly at first, spin around, and as I went faster and faster, I would say “OooooooooooohhhhhHHHHHH…..WHEEEEEEEEEEEeeee…” until I had gone as fast as Safety would allow. She would be giggling like crazy. I would slow, slow some more, and then stop, much in the manner of a Merry-Go-Round. Then I’d carefully set her on her feet and we would both wander in a dizzy slight stupor.
Naturally, when the Inktober prompt turned up Dizzy, I thought of this cherished father-daughter ritual, and the page practically drew itself.
Flytrap, trapdoor, shut your trap, Trappist monk, claptrap, you can Rhomb Us but you can’t Trap a Zoid–got Trap trapped in the echoey confines of my brainpan. A labyrinth, an ambush, a spider’s web, a roach hotel, the human body itself–Traps are everywhere. They might keep us agile; they might keep us from Freedom.
Here is an odd approach to an image: quote some song lyrics, and illustrate something related to the lyrics but not directly illustrative of the lyrics. I did the drawing first, and then heard the song in my head, and realized that the last words of the song would add a touch of Storminess to the page.
This time around I decided to have a little fun with some mid-20th-century examples of rocketry, and find other, non-rocketry examples of things with similar names. It’s a good drawing EXERCISE, but not necessarily a good DRAWING, but later drawings will I hope be better because I went through these motions today.
When I was a child I read about the frontier in history books, and saw The Final Frontier unfold in 1966. And in science fiction, three words from Robert Heinlein’s The Star Beast stuck with me forever: “Space is vast.” Three short words have spawned a gushing river of thought.
Components of modern outposts are crafted on Earth and then flung into Space, and we endlessly wonder what friends or foes or indifferent Others are out in that vastness.
A long time ago I read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which included a prayer of sorts, ending with
…the lightning with all its rapid wrath,
And the winds with the swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the earth with its starkness:
All these I place,
By God’s almighty help and grace,
Between myself and the powers of darkness.
Today’s Inktober prompt is Armor. And what better Armor that the elements themselves? So I drew, not the elements, but crystal-like metaphors for them, to surround my person in need. I then looked up L’Engle to get the quotation right, and was flabbergasted to find that she had derived her invocation from something now referred to as…Saint Patrick’s Breastplate!
Instead of L’Engle, then, I included phrases from the original, in the original language. Up top it says “attomriug indiu,” which means “I bind to myself today.” “fudomna mara” is “the depth of the sea,” and so forth. I faked some uncial calligraphy for the phrases, intending to lend a mystic-incantation aura to the image.
When I was a college student the Dune series by Frank Herbert was well under way with Dune and Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. I joked at the time that How Ya Dune was right around the corner. Here it is at last! 🙂
There are more verminous creatures afoot than Cockroaches and Houseflies, Friends.
One with Clay, Image and Text 